Hacker News Reader

drivebycommenton Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

I just tried "how to use a massage ball" and I don't see any ads, and links seem to be all legit articles, with YouTube video tutorials at the top.

drivebycommenton RISC vs. CISC by John R. Mashey (1995)

Whoa. Comp.arch. I learned so much from that during 90s. There's nothing like debates with anecdotes thrown between experienced folks to learn from, and comp.arch back then had such a high signal-noise ratio that it was amazing.

drivebycommenton NHTSA Tesla Report (2024) [pdf]

Let's say you are right that there is an epidemic of careless and underskilled drivers. Is it then ok to give those people a drive assist system named "autopilot" and "full self driving" with strong wink and nudge that people can drive with less attention ? Regardless of legal responsibility, with your assumption, it seems it's totally fair to criticize Tesla for making an already terrible problem worse.

drivebycommenton The Performance Impact of C++'s `final` Keyword

+1. On modern hardware and software systems, performance is effectively stochastic to some degree, as small random perturbations to the input (code, data, environments, etc) can have arbitrary effects for the performance. This means you can't draw a direct causal chain / mechanism from what you changed to the performance change - when it matters, you do need to do a deeper analysis and investigation to find the actual and full causal chain. I.e. a correlation is not a causation, and especially more so on modern hardware and software systems.

drivebycommenton NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

Modern systems can automatically detect bad memories and map those hardware pages out. SSDs can do it at the firmware. ECC are also self correcting.

The "hack" wouldn't be necessary, or can be done natively in many modern systems.

drivebycommenton My 25-year engineering career retrospective

> On reflection, creating new developers is a lot like parenting.

Indeed. This resonated with me.

Quite a few similarities between parenting and training people.

Sometimes you have to let them suffer a bit, suffering consequences so that they can learn, and sometimes you have to keep them from hurting themselves too much.

You also grow with them. Learning together from different perspectives.

After some time together, you see how your actions, not your words, shape their actions, even some unintentional or unconscious ones.

drivebycommenton T-Mobile employees across the country receive cash offers to illegally swap SIMs

> On the contrary, most customers are under automated attacks, and SMS plus password leaks lets that takeover be fully automated.

Are you implying there's automated SIM swap attacks in the wild ? Or, maybe you are saying SMS can be phished ? I do agree SMS 2nd factor can be phished, but if phishing is the attack, password leaks is irrelevant since, you usually phish both passwords and SMS 2nd factor together, so password leaks don't make any difference.

drivebycommenton Twitter Caught Selling Data to Government Spies While Complaining About Surveill

First of all, the original source is better:

https://theintercept.com/2024/03/25/elon-musk-x-dataminr-sur...

And an important missing part:

> companies like Dataminr continuously monitor public activity on social media and other internet platforms.

drivebycommenton Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

> make it editable without others needing accounts

This requirement brings a very difficult mix of challenges around security, privacy, regulatory compliance and business priorities.

As a toy / personal project it could work, but realistically this is unlikely to ever materialize in a way that you imagine.

drivebycommenton Let's Ban SMS 2FA

The author has a few assumptions that I think are incorrect.

Not all accounts need the same level of security or protection. SMS 2FA can be a very reasonable option depending on the accounts. No law can make that kind of a decision in a reasonable way. So the law has to be toothless (if it leaves too much leeway) or it will remove a valid option from people.

The usability and the availability of other 2FA are not on par with SMS. The gap is not trivial as the author makes it sound like. Account recovery problem is a very difficult one to fix cleanly for all types of accounts. SMS is still a useful option.

Sim swap attack is multiple orders of magnitude more difficult than credential stuffing. It's not close to the most important attack vector for majority of people. It certainly is not worth legislating a solution for specifically. There are reasonable practical solutions for people who want protection against SMS as 2fa from sim hijacking - e.g. many cell phone providers support 2fa or pin to protect it from the sim attack in most scenarios. It's a much cheaper solution for the society than banning SMS 2fa.

drivebycommenton Google significantly reduces recaptcha free tier, introduces new pricing models

> Likewise captcha is useless against multimodal LLM available to anybody, many of which can be run locally

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of why captcha exists. If the attacker has to deploy a multimodal LLM to solve captcha, the service provider using captcha has already effectively achieved its goal - since the goal is to raise the cost (in terms of any combination of complexity, computing power, and dollar amount) of sending bulk traffic and ultimately to reduce, not eliminate, the overall attack rate. 0 bulk traffic is never the goal.

drivebycommenton Healing Invisibly: What doctors learn by playing music

The biological effect of music on our brain has many studies.

https://www.pfizer.com/news/articles/why_and_how_music_moves...

Given how profound the impact seems to be, I would be very surprised if there's no biological component to the correlation between the occupations and the music - but almost certainly the cultural aspect would also play a major role.

drivebycommenton The Itanic Saga: The History of VLIW and Itanium

Approximately never for non-HPC code.

drivebycommenton Google is apparently struggling to contain an ongoing spam attack

https://developers.google.com/search/apis/indexing-api/v3/us...

drivebycommenton 3500 arrested in global cybercrime crackdown

$300M seized means the actual money victims lost over time is likely multiple times higher - wouldn't be surprising if it's closer to 10x than 2x.

drivebycommenton DIY Home EV Charger

To be honest, I think the guy learned more than most electrical contractors actually know or care to check when it comes to the EVSE. I certainly would object if he is selling this or installing on other people's houses, but this looks actually acceptable for now. The longevity is a big question, since usually there's no easy way to check / test that with a singleton bespoke design/build, and that's sometimes what distinguishes the one-off vs mass manufactured stuff, albeit in both directions. Sometimes a bespoke design misses some subtle design choice and it breaks down sooner, but sometimes you can do a lot more careful handcrafting and "simple" over-engineering with a bespoke singleton to make things last even longer than mass produced stuff. I think the mechanical and the environmental aspects - condensation, thermal expansion, etc - are probably the biggest question mark here.

drivebycommenton New York may ban noncompete employment agreements and Wall Street is not happy

Lawsuit is common.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/03/10/noncompet...

drivebycommenton The share of Americans who are mortgage-free is at an all-time high

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

shows the overall home ownership has been going up since 2016, currently around 66% though still lower than peak 69% in 2014, but higher than 63% in 1965.

drivebycommenton We've learned nothing from the SolarWinds hack

The inconvenient truth is that people say they want more, better security but they don't want to pay for it. So to survive you need "just enough" security to get by, and that "just enough" turns out to be quite low. It's also not clear if a significantly better proactive security is necessarily better - humanity is still collectively figuring out how to balance the security/privacy vs the convenience, and we do risk fossilized information technology stacks if we jump on the security too hard.

That said, it's often easy things that get the most benefit and we are collectively a long way away from getting the basic security things done properly across the board.

drivebycommenton Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed with the Linux 6.7 Kernel

It's not a shame. IA64 did more harm than good for the humanity and the computing industry. It was a dead-end architecture that should have died sooner than it did. Hubris and inertia kept it going much longer than it should have, and delayed so much of other progress. I would say good riddance.

drivebycommenton FTC Chair Lina Khan looks for allies and leads in Silicon Valley charm offensive

I think she certainly has pounded the table, and started a bunch of actions, but I am not sure what she has actually accomplished / delivered so far. I think she hasn't yet delivered any meaningful results yet, so I will reserve my judgement till there's any real outcome.

drivebycommenton As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273018/number-of-interne...

The number of users on the internet went 5x from 2005 to now.

https://www.zippia.com/advice/online-shopping-statistics/

E-commerce volume went similarly steep and steady in increase.

https://siteefy.com/how-many-websites-are-there/

Number of active websites went up similarly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia#...

Wikipedia number of articles exploded.

drivebycommenton As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

The Internet is more useful than it ever was for a lot more people. It has more information on more stuff, and you can do a lot more than you ever could, and a lot more people benefit from it in more ways than ever. Is it universally better in every way ? No. Could it be better in many important ways? Yes. But hyperbolic statements like "the Internet was ruined" is just nostalgia and hyperbole.

drivebycommenton YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

uBO readme https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/README.md makes it clear this is not for profit;

> Free. Open-source. For users by users. No donations sought.

> If you ever want to contribute something, think about the people working hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which are available to use by all for free.

drivebycommenton Microsoft SEC 8-K: IRS is seeking an additional tax payment of $29B

Apple pays the majority of taxes to US. They report US income and pay taxes for that to US. Ireland is involved only so far as EU income. So if your American app is sold to European users, the income is recognized as EU, and reported to Ireland.

https://fortune.com/2017/10/31/trump-tax-reform-apple-multin...

There are other possible criticisms on corporate tax and Apple, but this isn't a valid one.

drivebycommenton Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Chrome was noticeably faster, not just the benchmark but actual usage , in both startup time and ajax sites. It crashed less often, and when it crashed, usually it took down only a single tab instead of the entire browser. The UI was more minimal and clean.

It was superior in almost every way. All other browsers had to play the catch-up for a while - especially the performance.

drivebycommenton Privacy washing: Google claims to support privacy while lobbying against it

In what ways are Apple and Google not transparent about their privacy practices ? I think both are quite clear and upfront about where the lines are, compared to pretty much everyone else.

Accountable is interesting - they are as accountable as any other company, and if anything, both are under much closer scrutiny than anyone else, and have bigger reputational risks than anyone else.

drivebycommenton Bard can now connect to your Google Apps and services

I was curious about that and the linked blog post answers that:

> If you choose to use the Workspace extensions, your content from Gmail, Docs and Drive is not seen by human reviewers, used by Bard to show you ads or used to train the Bard model.

drivebycommenton Chrome now tracks users and shares a “topic” list with advertisers

Sure, Google botched some of their communication on their end for sure. But the job of a journalist is to give clarity and pass along as accurate information and valid pros and cons by doing some basic research, so that the readers end up more informed after reading an article. His article did the opposite - see the comment section of the second article for how a lot of people were more confused / misinformed by Ron's article. Of course, not all of that was due to his article, but it's very clear his article made the confusion meaningfully worse.

drivebycommenton Chrome now tracks users and shares a “topic” list with advertisers

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/passwordless-google-...

is the article. The title is already misleading - Google doesn't support passwordless account, and there is no way to get a passkey only account. So factually incorrect title. Anyway, read that and contrast that with:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/passw...